SGER: Flash Memory DBMS for Transactional Database Applications

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Flash memory storage devices are now considered to have tremendous potential as a new storage medium that can replace magnetic disks. Flash memory, however, has its own limitations such as erase-before-update and exhibits poor performance for small-to-moderate sized writes requested in a random order. The goal of this project is to develop new flash-aware designs and optimization strategies that allow large-scale transactional database applications to run efficiently on computing platforms equipped with flash memory storage devices as a main storage medium. This project achieves its goal by (1) analyzing the performance implications of different I/O workloads on flash memory, and the applicability of flash memory to different types of tablespaces in databases, (2) inventing new paradigms, designs, data structures and algorithms, hot spot separation, and write optimization techniques, so that enterprise database servers can run on the target computing platforms efficiently. The findings from this project will not only overcome the limitations of flash memory but also exploit the advantages of flash memory for transactional database workloads exhibiting randomly scattered data access patterns. The paradigms and processing strategies developed can be applied to other areas such as health-care and sensor-network based environment study that require data management on flash memory storage systems. The findings and deliverables of the project will be disseminated broadly in the form of software packages, research articles, technical reports, and data sets via the project web site(http://www.cs.arizona.edu/projects/fmdb).